The Internet of Things (“IoT”) is a concept of making physical objects, collectively “things,” network addressable to facilitate interconnectivity for the exchange of data. IoT represents a significant business opportunity for service providers. Industry standards for the IoT infrastructure are currently in flux. To realize the lucrative promise of this new industry, issues associated with network capacity, forensic accountability, and data security must be addressed.
Without exaggeration, the IoT industry has the potential to exponentially increase the amount internet traffic. Within a matter of years, the impact of this new internet traffic will dramatically affect network capacity and result in a need for tools for service providers to implement to efficiently allocate this vital resource.
Cyber security breaches are becoming ever prevalent. How service providers and other entities respond to these security breaches will define the quality and reputation of their IoT architecture. Currently, if an IoT device is breached, tampered with, stolen, broken, or otherwise compromised so as to malfunction, there is very little that can be done to resume communications with the IoT device. If an IoT device has experienced a malfunction and goes offline, that IoT device is impossible to track, and for this reason, it is also impossible to determine the cause of the malfunction. At this point, service providers have no tools at their disposal to determine what happened to the IoT device, who attacked it, why they attacked it, or if there even was an attack. A service provider's service/product line and branding will be defined by how they are capable of determining the causal factors of IoT device malfunctions and reacting to these malfunctions quickly to resume normal operations. For these reasons, forensic accounting tools are vital for a service provider's IoT architecture.
The cost, size, and power define the design and functional limits of traditional IoT sensors. These sensors are small, which means that they have small processors, and, for this reason, do not have the crypto stack typically utilized in a general purpose computer. Services such as data encryption therefore are not available for today's IoT sensors. As more and more IoT sensors are deployed, the security implications of insecure data exchange among IoT sensors becomes increasingly problematic. The future success of the IoT industry depends largely on the implementation of proper security features to eliminate insecure data exchanges among other security vulnerabilities.